NO BOUNDARIES
Salvador Dali, Photography and the Cyborg
Angela Glass Ph.D.
"Why should our bodies end at the skin or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?" asks Donna Haraway in her classic essay, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs [1985]." "Cyborg imagery," she claims, "can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves." This aspect of Haraway’s development of the metaphor of the cyborg, and the crisscrossing of borders it implies, provides a starting point for my consideration of the relationship between cyborg imagery and Salvador Dalí’s surrealist art. Although Dalí is best known as a surrealist painter, one of the key ways that his art practice connects to contemporary art is through photography. The fact that as far as we know, Dalí himself never used a camera, only serves to strengthen this connection.
In "Photography: Pure Creation of the Mind [1927]," Dalí advocated the camera as a means to see with "pure objectivity." In one of many ways that his texts elude distinctions between eye and camera, he called for his readers to look outward with the "pure crystalline objectivity of the glass." Dalí’s faith in looking outward separated him from the surrealist practice of automatism, which he believed was too passive and introspective. Instead of looking inward, he advocated "opening our eyes and being adept in the apprenticeship of looking properly." Closing your eyes in order to gain access to one’s innermost thoughts, according to Dalí, was "an anti-poetic way of perceiving resonances." Instead he equated looking with inventing and recommended the mechanical eye of the camera as one of the ways to enhance the visual experience. "Knowing how to look is a means of inventing. And no invention," Dalí emphasized, "has been as pure as that created by the anesthetic gaze of the naked, lashless eye of Zeiss [a reference to a camera lens manufacturer]." Two years later, in the essay "Photographic Data," Dalí expanded on his belief that the camera enhances our understanding of ourselves and the world we inhabit:
The photograph is capable of realizing the most complete, scrupulous and moving catalogue that man has ever been able to imagine. From the subtlety of aquaria to the fastest, most fleeting gestures of wild animals, the photograph affords us a thousand fragmentary images culminating in a dramatized cognitive totalization. The spire of a Cathedral, at a height of ten meters from the ground, in constant darkness, is revealed to us by the photograph with that very fineness of detail, made possible only by the skillful photogenic quality to which the photographer can subject things, by which he enables us, finally, to know them. In addition to the implacable rigor to which photographic data subject our mind, they are always and essentially the surest vehicle of poetry and the most agile process for perceiving the most delicate osmoses that are established between reality and surreality.
The mere fact of the photographic transposition already implies a total invention: the registering of an unknown reality. Nothing has come to prove surrealism more correct than photography. Oh Zeiss, lens so full of uncommon faculties of surprise!"
More recently, Rosalind Krauss called for "the relocation of photography from its eccentric position relative to surrealism to one that is absolutely central—definitive, one might say." Moreover, she noted that the "special access that photography has to [the experience of reality transformed into representation] is its privileged connection to the real." This "experience of reality as representation," according to Krauss, "lies at the very heart of surrealist thinking." In a passage that has resonance with Dalí’s texts of the late 1920s, Krauss acknowledged that the "eyes" of the camera:
…see faster, sharper, at stranger angles, closer-to, microscopically, with a transposition of tonalities, with the penetration of X ray, and with access to the multiplication of images that makes possible the writing of association and memory. Camera-seeing is thus an extraordinary extension of normal vision, one that supplements the deficiencies of the naked eye. The camera covers and arms this nakedness, it acts as a kind of prosthesis, enlarging the capacity of the human body.
Recognition of the irretrievable connection between the self and its tools—in this case the eye and the camera—and the expanded vision this connection allows, is one of the primary places where surrealism and the cyborg intersect.
The camera, however, was not the only tool endorsed by Dalí to enhance vision and representational capability. His paranoiac-critical method had similar goals, especially insofar as it aimed to transform a visual experience into a painted image. This artmaking strategy is another way that Dalí’s surrealist art practice connects to contemporary culture and, more specifically, to cyborgian imagery. Haraway defined one of her main interests as "the way self and other are, in a sense, perspectival issues. What counts as self and what counts as other is a perspectival question or a question of purposes. Within which context are which boundaries, firm?" More than half-a-century earlier, Dalí used his paranoiac-critical method to explore similar terrain. Bice Curiger, curator of the exhibition, Hypermental: Rampant Reality 1950-2000 From Salvador Dalí to Jeff Koons, acknowledged both Dalí and Duchamp as key figures "in forming a bridge between the avant-garde in the early years of the century and its later manifestations." Although the Dalí paintings in Hypermental date from the 1950s and 1960s—decades after his surrealist period—as Norman Bryson points out in his catalogue essay, the "territory that was opened in the twenties and thirties remains with us today, as part of the ‘unfinished’ project of modernity." "Dalí’s researches into perception and optical illusions are surrounded by an atmosphere of fevered fluidity," wrote Curiger, who used the word "universality" in her description of him. "Not as in Renaissance Man…but a 20th and 21st century universality for the seeing person and the paranoiac alike, whose intelligence finds itself at an interface of many different forces, aware that it can never rationally penetrate the whole or the totality of anything." Curiger’s portrayal of Dalí has resonance with Haraway’s description of the cyborg as "resolutely committed to partiality." "The relationships for forming wholes from parts," according to Haraway, "including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world."
Moreover, in her discussion of Dalí’s relevance to contemporary art, Curiger rightly singled out his paranoiac-critical method to distinguish his art practice from other surrealists, who, "stressed the existence of a psychic reality as opposed to a rational concept of what is real." "While André Breton insisted in his first surrealist manifesto that creative work should be free of any kind of rational control or aesthetic or moral constraints," she continued, "Salvador Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method is closer to art praxis today in that it makes provision for an observing agent that takes action and passes on and works through the impulses it receives. Curiger described how Dalí’s signature style anticipated today’s hyperrealism. "In the super-charged arena of art and consciousness," she wrote, "it has become clear that our media-oriented society is continually producing hyperrealities—for all the world as though Dalí’s ‘paranoiac-critical method’ had long since become a ubiquitous, collective hallucination ritual." Although by no means a flawless strategy, Dalí’s exploitation of the psychological concept of paranoia gave him a means—not unlike the metaphor of the cyborg—to question conventional thinking about the borders between interpretation and authorship, reality and fiction, and the structures of organization and production.
As the Hypermental exhibition established, Dalí is a catalyst for discussion of the changes in art practices between the first and second halves of the twentieth-century. According to Curiger, "Dalí used his ‘painterly eye’ as his own personal state-of-the-art camera," which combined with his love of detail to produce a kind of "hyperrealism avant la lettre." As Krauss pointed out, surrealist photographers often would:
…do nothing more than recontextualize an object about which everything was otherwise ‘normal.’ Objects thus invested seemed both real and ‘virtual,’ both outside the viewing subject and a function of that subject’s imagination. It is precisely this sense of an image world fusing with a real world that characterizes our present image-infested culture, whether we call that a culture of spectacle or of simulation.
The fluid borders between image world and real world, self and other, human and animal, manipulator and author connect the cyborg and surrealism. An excellent example of this is the "Phantom of Sex Appeal" photographs taken in London during the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition. These gelatin-silver prints feature a woman—whose head is completely covered in leaves—standing in Trafalgar Square where pigeons—apparently unable to distinguish the figure as human or vegetable—land on her out-stretched arms. While Dalí orchestrated the event and directed the cameraman, he did not actually take the pictures. Yet these photographs have been used to describe Dalí "as the most emblematically surrealist photographer of all." If the ground-breaking essay, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" is, as Haraway claims, "an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction" then the absence of defining borders in these photographs, which aim to leave the viewer avidly bewildered, may qualify him as the most cyborgian surrealist artist of all.
1 Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, Edited by Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, Kath Woodward, Fiona Hovenden (London and New York: Routledge in Association with The Open University, 2000), 57.
Salvador Dalí, "Photography: Pure Creation of the Mind," L’Amic de les Arts no. 18, September 30, 1927. Reprinted in Oui, 12.
Salvador Dalí, "Photographic Data," La Gaceta Literaria no. 6, February 1929. Reprinted in Oui, 70-71.
Rosalind E. Krauss, "Photographic Conditions of Surrealism," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 101.
Ibid., 112.
Ibid., 116.
Donna J. Haraway interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, How Like a Leaf, (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 75.
Bice Curiger, Hypermental: Rampant Reality 1950-2000 from Salvador Dalí to Jeff Koons (Osfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001), 10.
Norman Bryson, "The Unfinished Project of Surrealism," Hypermental, 15.
Curiger, 11-12.
Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," 51.
Curiger, 10-11.
Ibid.
Krauss, 723.
Ibid.
Haraway, 51.
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